Tasked with creating a system I would find useful for my personal life or a potential client’s business, I decided to rebuild my existing recipe tracker from Notion in Airtable.

🎥 See a quick walkthrough of the process below!

A few months ago, I created a recipe tracker in Notion that looked like this. At a glance, you saw an enticing image, the name of the recipe, the source (linked), how many ingredients were missing, and a personal rating.

Here's the backend. Recipes were linked to one another to easily decide on pairings using Relation. Other properties included:

Category: Meals, Snacks, Sandwiches/Wraps, Desserts, Sauces/Dressings, etc.

Energy needed to make this recipe: Low, Medium, High

Main ingredients needed and optional ingredients

Preparation: Instant Pot, Stovetop, Oven, Blender, etc.

Tags: Vegan, Chicken, Pork, Dairy, Vegetarian, Seafood, etc.

The recipe view provided a helpful overview of what was needed. Yet to see which specific ingredients were out of stock and whether the recommended pairing to the meal was ready to make, multiple additional clicks were required.

However, as much as I love Notion for other aspects of my life, Airtable was calling to me in all its colourful glory ✨

Fewer columns and formula workarounds were needed to display the same information.

Now I can easily see which ingredients are in stock, their location in my house, and determine what substitutions can be made for those out of stock.

Just like Notion, the ingredients live in a separate table as records.

As a workaround to Airtable's Web Clipper app (only available on the Pro Plan), I set up a Zap using the Zapier Chrome Extension to add new recipes to my recipe tracker as I find them online!